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In retirement, John Rebus finds himself up against two immovable objects: Big Ger Cassidy and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Cassidy represents Rebus’s bygone detecting life when Big Ger bossed Edinburgh’s major crime organization. COPD introduces a wicked new medical threat. To fight it, Rebus at last packs in the cigs, but it may be a touch too late for the old reprobate.

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The back and forth with Cassidy enters a new phase when Cassidy’s successor in Edinburgh crime bossing involves not just Cassidy, but the retired Rebus, too, in some serious shenanigans. At the same time, Rebus is moved to take another look at an unsolved murder case so cold it reaches back to the old fellow’s beloved classic rock days of the 1970s.

All of this grows too tangled for one man to handle, and by necessity, Rather Be The Devil gives equal sleuthing space to Rankin’s other cop front-liners, the shrewd Siobhan Clarke and the deceptively brainy Malcolm Fox. Everybody gets some fun out of this, especially Rankin fans who expect — and receive — a devilishly clever set of plot complications and a regular parade of laughs. The latter, alas, tend to fade when one is reminded of the fateful four letters, COPD.

South Village

By Rob Hart

Polis Books, 280 pages, $21.50

Ash McKenna is in a perpetual state of angst, but who can blame the poor guy? This is just the third book in the series featuring McKenna, a sometime private eye and, already in the first two books, the girl of his dreams has been murdered and he has accidentally bumped off a guy of dubious character. Now, in South Village, he’s hanging out in an old-style hippie commune in the middle of Georgia. One of the inmates — who lives in a tree house — is found splayed on the ground, dead at the foot of his tree. A fall or a murder? Ash noses into the mystery and, before long, the story involves FBI agents, suspected eco-terrorists and contests between the hip and the square. All of this makes for an unconventional whodunit, but Ash’s determined sleuthing and the book’s deft grasp of the oddball hippie milieu combine to provide persuasive entertainment.

The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories

By P.D. James

Knopf, 160 pages, $27.95

In the preface to this posthumously published collection of four longish stories, the late P.D. James praises “the shock of surprise” as “the most ingenious element of the short story.” Then, in three of the four stories, writing in her trademark careful and unhurried prose, James delivers the goods in the surprise department (the fourth story works as a send-up of the Agatha Christie style of multiple-clue plotting).

Most of the surprise is provided in the unmasking of the guilty party at the finale of each story when it’s inevitably revealed that the least likely suspect did the murderous deed. But, also in the unexpected category, the sleuth figure in one story is an uncallow eighteen-year-old and, in another, the murder that needs solving goes back 67 years. The book, in other words, represents James in very fine form.

I See You

By Clare Mackintosh

Berkley, 374 pages, $24

After reading Clare Mackintosh’s new book, no sensible woman would ever ride a London underground train again. The bad guy’s scheme — though who knows if it’s a guy or if it’s even just a single villain — is based on stalking a woman’s route to work on the underground, then making the route available on secret computer links to sick fiends given to rape and murder. The story is told in alternating sections by a woman under siege from the scheme’s twisted mastermind and a woman cop who’s on the mastermind’s heels. Who wins? Nothing may be final in this excellently creepy thriller.

Jack Batten’s Whodunit column appears every other Saturday.

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